You might have seen various rumors centered around the 900P lately. The first is that the 900P was to supposedly support PCIe 4.0. This is not true, and after digging back a bit appears to be a foreign vendor mistaking / confusing PCIe X4 (4 lanes) with the recently drafted PCIe 4.0 specification. Another set of rumors centered around pre-order listings and potential pricing for the 280 and 480 GB variants of the 900P. We are happy to report that those prices (at the time of this writing) are way higher than Intel’s stated MSRP's for these new models. I’ll even go as far as to say that the 480GB model can be had for less than what the 280GB model is currently listed for! More on that later in the review.

Specifications:

Performance specs are one place where the rumors were all true, but since all the folks had to go on was a leaked Intel press deck slide listing figures identical to the P4800X, we’re not really surprised here.

Lots of technical stuff above, but the high points are <10us typical latency (‘regular’ SSDs run between 60-100us), 2.5/2.0 GB/s sequential reads/writes, and 550k/500k random read/write performance. Yes I know, don’t tell me, you’ve seen higher sequentials on smaller form factor devices. I agree, and we’ve even seen higher maximum performance from unreleased 3D XPoint-equipped parts from Micron, but Intel has done what they needed to do in order to make this a viable shipping retail product, which likely means sacrificing the ‘megapixel race’ figures in favor of offering the lowest possible latencies and best possible endurance at this price point.

Packaging:

Packaging is among the nicest we’ve seen from an Intel SSD. It actually reminds me of how the Fusion-io ioDrives used to come.

Also included with the 900P is a Star Citizen ship. The Sabre Raven has been a topic of gossip and speculation for months now, and it appears to be a pretty sweet looking fighter. For those unaware, Star Citizen is a space-based MMO, and with a ‘ship purchase’ also comes a license to play the game. The Sabre Raven counts as such a purchase and apparently comes with lifetime insurance, meaning it will always be tied to your account in case it gets blown up doing data runs. Long story short, you get the game for free with the purchase of a 900P.

It isn't specifically that the erase is slow. It is that the device can write a page at a time, but the erase is a block of many pages at once. When you delete a file on a hard drive there is nothing to tell the device that the blocks belonging to that file are no longer needed. It was not necessary for hard drives. The OS would just change some of the file systems data structures to indicate that those blocks are free. Nothing would happen to the pages until they are overwritten for another file.

For an SSD, it has to move all of the pages with valid data somewhere else (probably DRAM cache) if it wants to overwrite an existing page. If the system didn't use trim to tell the SSD which pages are invalid (part of a deleted file), the SSD could waste a lot of time (and possibly write cycles) preserving invalid data. So when you delete something, trim just sends a list of those pages to the SSD. If it wants to rewrite a block containing some of those pages, it knows it doesn't need to save them. This reduces the amount of writes necessary and also increases performance since the drive isn't busy shuffling around invalid pages.

Do you happen to know if or when this ssd will be fully compatible with notebooks. From what I read, all notebooks need a bios update to fully function. I have a just released 9360 dell xps 13 with 8th gen intel. I don't see why it would not support given that manufactures where aware of the interest in this ssd since july.

Yeah, like David said, the less 'necessary' space allocated to flash, the better it can perform since it needs to be able to shuffle stuff around due to the page/block limitations. TRIM is how the OS tells the storage device it doesn't need a given area anymore.

I got a 960 pro a few months ago, real talk does it feel a lot faster than running it on a 960 pro system or is the difference hardly noticeable. Want to know if I should jump on board or wait for micron/later generations.

The system feels faster. Not as big of a jump from HDD to SATA SSD, but still a jump. Depends on what you're doing really. If you have a bunch of background storage stuff running that would normally cause a noticeable slowdown, that pretty much won't happen with this drive.

Not so hypothetically, if you were to switch from a Samsung 950 Pro 512GB over to the Optane SSD 900P 480GB, on an X99 based system with a Core i7-5930K, would this keep the system feeling "fresh" for a couple more years, versus an upgrade to X299 and suitable processor (assuming I stuck with the 950 Pro.)

Note, I do boot from the Samsung 950 Pro, I already have the CPU overclocked to 4.5GHz, RAM is at 2666 MHz, and I have most of my important / frequently accessed data on an Intel 750 Series SSD 1.2TB.

I need to pour through the data again, but I'm having a hard time telling if this is a compelling drive for booting Windows, or if it is more suited for storing VMWare virtual machine images (I run VMWare Workstation for proof of concept type stuff with mostly Oracle and SQL Server databases.)

Also, you already know my bias here.
Would you expect better performance
if the add-in card had an x16 edge connector?
Wouldn't that quadruple raw bandwidth,
provided that the on-board controller
supported more parallelism?

Allyn, Based alone on your knowledge already
acquired from so many prior measurements, what would
you predict by wiring 4 x 900P U.2 SSDs to an
ASUS Hyper M.2 x16 and 4 x M.2-to-U.2 adapters?

Since the AIC and U.2 versions of this Optane 900P
are electrically identical, there is something
to be said for using only one x16 PCIe slot
to drive 4 such SSDs, rather than using four
x16 PCIe slots with only one such AIC in each slot.

From what prior measurements would you recommend
that we extrapolate, in order to predict an answer
to that question? How about the review you did
of 4 x 32GB M.2 Optanes and the Hyper M.2 x16 AIC?

My point was that the slots you use for this card most likely are not routed to the chipset in the first place. If it’s a single drive and is going through the chipset, it would be very hard to notice the difference, unless you were using RST and had a pair of them in a RAID.

You might be referring to the ASUS DIMM.2 socket
and the matching DIMM.2 riser card. That card
supports 2 x M.2 NVMe SSDs. As such, it should
be possible to install 2 M.2-to-U.2 adapters
and cable them to this new Optane 900P with U.2
connector. Consult with Allyn to prove or
disprove my comment here :) Also, there is
already a lot of information on the Internet
about the ASUS DIMM.2 socket:
Google "ASUS DIMM.2" finds 1.13 million results today.

A really interesting calculation is to compute
the transmission time of a 4K IOP e.g. exact
time to transmit 4,096 bytes over different
edge connectors with x4, x8 and x16 lanes,
8 GHz clock speed and 128b/130b jumbo frame.

Then, as Allyn has taught us some months ago,
compare that transmission time to the latency
required to access each 4K record.

Thus, if we add that transmission time to
the measured latency, the latency is a
large percentage of that sum.

4KB going one direction comes to ~10% of the 10us response time of the 900P

Fun facts:

The typical motherboard circuit path length to a PCIe card is ~3-6"

Not including bus negotiation and setup time, the time to transit 1 byte across 3" of PCIe 3.0 x4 is ~508 picoseconds.

The 900P is done transmitting each byte to the CPU before the CPU has seen the first bit of that data at its input. If you could freeze time at just the right moment and observe the electrons in the PCIe lanes across the motherboard, you could literally read the full byte of data, as all of it would be sitting only on the motherboard lanes at that time.

hey, this is my first time commenting on a tech review site, but i just wanted to say it's really cool how much detail yall went into with the new test suite. the bit about which queue depth users would likely operate under answered a lot of questions in particular. thanks for doing a good job.

and to clarify something: if a user were to, say, screencapture and save uncompressed or lossless full-resolution game footage, that would be a close analog to a large file copy and would likely operate under varying low-to-medium-level queue depths, if I understand correctly?

unfortunately, it wouldn't be a tech review comment without a request attached. while i would expect most ramdisk software to behave basically the same (they use the same ram, after all), i did manage to find one roundup that did nothing more than run crystaldiskmark on a bunch of free ramdisk software, and still found pretty significant differences. i'd love to see a more indepth look at that. :>

Raw screen uncompressed screen capture does a lot of writing, so the higher endurance would certainly help. Some capture methods are finicky and may drop frames if the storage is inconsistent, and the 900P will certainly help there as well.

If you go back and look at that ramdisk review, you'll probably notice that the fastest ones also did not scale with queue depth. That was because they (the faster ones) do not use a queue.

Not everything is paged to swap, especially cache. It may help with some things, especially those that require more RAM than is installed in the system, but you won't get the same raw performance, faster boots, greater overall responsiveness as you would with a larger single Optane drive.

Side note - the 32GB part is probably better used with the Intel Optane Memory driver / caching software installed as opposed to just as a pagefile store.

Blender 3D with working on large single multi-million polygon count mesh models can really use up 8/16 GB of system memory and cause the system to begin thrashing about doing page fault swapping.

So I'd love to see some Optane testing of that in Blender's 3D edit mode and not necessarily the renderer. I can easily overwhelm my laptop's 8GB of memory when trying to edit a very large high polygon count single mesh model. As when running an editing function like a vertex smooth on an entire million+ polygon mesh model/object and Blender has to inerate through the entire mesh object's data-set of vertex points. This can easily cause my system to become unuseable for 5-10 minutes sometimes as the entire mesh object's data set has to be loaded/swapped into RAM, worked on, and paged to disk, before it's done all over again until the editing operation is complete. And this will cause OS/Application paging faluts and system page file thrashing with my hard drive(spinning rust) unable to meet the page fault demands.

Blender 3d can fill up system RAM and then ask for more via memory allowcation calls to the OS and can tax the OS/Hardware page file subsystems. Blender will easily eat all 8GB of my laptop's memory and spill out onto paged memory to the point of taxing the OS/Laptop's hardware with page faults/paging requests when I'm Editing very large single high polygon count mesh models.

I'm very interested in Optane/XPoint's durability above any NAND based drive's durability under very large OS/Application paging/page fault request loads as 3D graphics software can really fill that physical memory and overflow out into virtual memory in the normal 3D workloads that make use of large polygon count meshes and whole scenes that can be much larger.

Again, Allyn: many thanks for staying on top of the latest announcements in this field of storage technology. Your insights are accurate and timely, and your measurement software is excellent too. We also appreciate your willingness to answer questions here.

But yeah, it makes me wonder what could make my Skyrim load times faster. I know game startup is limited by my CPU for quite a bit of the time. Loading a new save in a different cell hits the drive hard, but if it's on the same cell it seems to be CPU bound. In the case of the latter, the fade in and out animation (just animation, or there to hide loading time?) takes up a decent chunk of the load time.

If Skyrim is anything like FO4's engine, it constantly hits the disk on every new area and entering a building. It doesn't matter that I have 64GB of RAM, it doesn't cache in RAM but instead pages from disk.

Why? I don't know. Poor optimization.

So here's what I did with FO4; I created a 40GB RAM/SSD disk (RAM cache first then spillover into SSD) and I could see with the software (primocache) that FO4 was constantly loading the from the disk even if I had just visited that area. It really did help with load times.

Now i've since got a 960 evo NVME drive and just put F04 on that and it still streams, just much faster.

"Meanwhile, if you reach 8.7PB on the 900P, Intel will forcibly move your drive into read-only mode. ... It is actually worse than locking in read-only mode - on the next boot cycle the drive gets bricked. So if you didn't manage to get that data in time, it is gone forever. Great feature. ... I have seen this with Intel consumer SSDs. It's amazing - it doesn't even tell you that it's failing and that you have one (yes, one) chance to backup your data before it goes forever. Usually the drive just throws an error, so your average user reboots the system and bam, the drive's not even in the BIOS anymore. Their drive failure behaviour is criminal."

Not sure where they got that, but I’m fairly certain that’s not how it works. Read-only at EOL yes, but not bricked upon reboot. OS might not play nicely mounting a read-only partition but the data should still be there.

I wish techsites test how long it takes to setup games especially with bigger and bigger game files. As well as game patches ( in some moba games it's literally a few gigs a week). I have a sata 6 SSD with a gigabit FiOS connection the sata 6 SSD is the rate limiting step.
If you want to convince people for the next big upgrade to nvme from sata 6. Loading times for games made compelling argument from hd to SSds.

I personally would love an SSds that will get me game ready faster and not just in load times but in installing the games and the daily weekly patches as well.
If you can somehow test this and show the time saved I would appreciate it.
This test would actually be useful real world data gamers can use.

I'm planning to build a gaming PC with dual 1080 Ti's, which mobo do you think would be best to use with the 480GB 900p Optane and would I have trouble fitting the add-in Optane card into the board with the 1080 Ti's there? Thanks for the post.

PC Perspective would like to thank Intel, ASUS, Gigabyte, Corsair, Kingston, and EVGA for supplying some of the components of our test rigs.

Disclaimer:

Ownership of PC Perspective also operates consulting firm Shrout Research. Shrout Research has provided research, consulting, and analysis for many companies in the high-tech industry including AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, and Arm. A white paper was published by Shrout Research using 900P engineering samples and was commissioned by Intel. All testing for this review was conducted separately and on retail samples of the 900P. This review was not commissioned or sponsored by Intel.